Flowers: Obama's skipping of Scalia's funeral is an affront to all

I USED TO smile knowingly, which is another way of saying "smirked," when someone would tell me they didn't go to funerals because the dead wouldn't know whether they showed up, and, besides, it was more important to show respect while the person was still alive.

Pardon me while I make the obligatory retching sound.

When you come from an Italian background, such pretentious blather is looked upon as a pathetic excuse to avoid going to church. Growing up, there was no question about attending a funeral Mass: You pulled out the black dress (which made you look 10 pounds slimmer, and therefore funerals became a highlight of those tortured, tubby teen years) stood, sat, kneeled and prayed at the appropriate moments for the repose of the dearly departed's soul, then went to eat the equivalent of three lunches in someone's kitchen.

Yes, I'm having a little fun at my bloodline's expense, but that's because I love my Italian upbringing so much that nothing I say can be taken for anything other than good-natured tweaking. To me, funerals simply were a part of the great continuum of life. I even attended a few where the body was on full display, and I was required to kiss the dearly departed on the forehead and say something along the lines of "he/she looks so beautiful." It was the polite thing to do.

Courtesy is, after all, an important part of life. It may not seem that way to the regular readers of this column, but I am able to suppress my most sincerely felt opinions about people I don't like before they become legally actionable defamatory statements. Conversely, I am capable of pretending to love someone when all I really want is for her ovaries to dry up like raisins and drop out of her body, in front of me.

Some would call this hypocrisy. I call this common decency.

Which brings me to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's death last weekend. It is both a national tragedy, and one that touches me personally, as I wrote in a column on Monday. The shadow cast by this giant of jurisprudence is so vast that, even in death, its depth and breadth are not diminished. Scalia, like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis before him, will be studied by our great-great-grandchildren, and his opinions will make them laugh and marvel at his brilliance, wit and humanity.

His philosophy was not embraced by everyone, and he managed to anger a lot of liberals with his inescapable logic and biting sarcasm. They couldn't challenge his mind, so they attacked his methods. They couldn't demolish his arguments, so they sulked about his intolerance. They couldn't dismantle his revolutionary framework for viewing the Founders' vision, so they attacked him personally.

And when he died, they came full force after him with vitriol unseen since feminists were given laptops and taught how to blog. My Daily News column garnered over 500 anonymous comments in the first 24 hours, most of them vicious attacks on the man I consider the greatest legal mind since Learned Hand.

That's where partisanship has gotten us. And it's too late to turn back the clock. But we should still cling to the appearance of courtesy on some special occasions.

Take Barack Obama. He is owed respect simply because of his office. In other words, we can dislike the man, but we should try to respect his title.

I have tried to do that for seven-plus years, and it has been very hard. I agree with virtually nothing he represents, I oppose his policies, his ethical orientation, his priorities. After he was first elected in 2008, I wrote a column about how I cried, and felt the heaviness of depression descend on my shoulders. Clearly, I am not a fan.

Yet, when people said slanderous things about him on social media, I'd try to push back because he was, for better or worse, the president. I remember the vicious gangs of hyenas that yapped and pursued President Bush, and I wanted to be better than they.

But this week, that changed. This week, Obama lost the benefit of any lingering doubt I had about his character. This week, I found out the president wasn't attending the funeral of my hero.

Some excuse it by saying he'll go to the wake. Some say he's not a hypocrite (Justice Samuel Alito might say "filibuster!" to that.) Some defend him by pointing to other presidents who missed judicial funerals. But none of those cases involved Supreme Court justices who died while they were still on the bench, unless you count when President Eisenhower snubbed Justice Robert H. Jackson's funeral.

Perhaps he is avoiding the Mass for some unrevealed death threats, or he doesn't feel comfortable in a Catholic church, given his advocacy for abortion rights.

But barring safety concerns, Obama should be in the pews when we commend Scalia to the angels. His absence is a slap in the face to that great man, to his grieving family, and to all of us who call him Mr. President.

Christine Flowers is a lawyer. You can reach her at cflowers1961@gmail.com

On Twitter: @flowerlady61